Where students learn to be job creators

Nagpur: Fourteen students graduated last week from a special course. The special thing being they did not have to attend any classes, go through tests and neither were there any grades to declare them successful. What they did was maintain journals which bore evidence of their growth for ten months. This was the experience of the first batch of Lemon School of Entrepreneurship (LSE) that introduced experiential learning in the region.The batch had students whose ages ranged between 17 and 35, hailing from different educational and professional backgrounds. These students attended lectures and activities in settings as inspiring as the Pench National Park and a furniture factory set up by a first generation entrepreneur.
Quais Husain (35) was always scared of venturing out on his own. “Fear of failure was what stopped me from many things, not just business. Over the last few months, though, I have overcome this fear,” he said when asked about his biggest take-back from the course. His classmate Gaurav Totla from Mumbai also felt he is more focused and sorted about his future because of the course.
Halfway through the course, the students were asked to pen down the business ideas they had. They came up with around 400 of them, which were all put through an idea funnel and narrowed down to 14, then seven. Ten of the fourteen people are involved in the final seven ventures, of which four are in the pilot stage and the rest have been launched. The others have been put on an extended mentorship programme.
It was tasks like building a boat during an adventure camp, trying to sell lemons on the street and thinking of new ideas during a train journey that made the students realize their strengths and weaknesses. For Quais, it was his spontaneity that he had to curb while Kishore Godithi from Odisha saw that he had too many ideas at once which had to be tuned down to one best idea. Sankalp Raut understood that he had to overcome his shyness and Amit Tiwari brought his response and reaction time down.
The best part of the course for them was the absence of teachers. “We were all expected to learn from our own mistakes, and from our classmates,” said former HR professional Pritam Dhenge.
Their mentor Deepak Menaria believes that having mentors and guest lecturers who are successful entrepreneurs themselves made a big difference. “Including psychology and self awareness in the courseware also had its rewards. Reflections gave the students their biggest lessons in this course,” he said. Technology mentor Nitin Gujarathi said he was proud of the growth he has seen in every student of the course. “Their entire attitude towards life has changed, they have matured,” he said.